Goneril is a kite: her ingratitude has a serpent’s tooth: she has struck her father most serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father’s breast: for her husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany, for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver’d: when Edgar as the Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust, deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, ‘consider him well,’ is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for jest,[1] seems to have been brooding on humanity in the light of it. It
- ↑ Eg. in As You Like It, I. ii. 187, ‘1 was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember’; Twelfth Night, IV. i. 55, ‘Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? Mal. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. Clow. What thinkest thou of his opinion? Mal. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion,’ etc. But earlier comes a passage which reminds us of King Lear, Merchant of Venice, IV. i. 128:
O be thou damn’d, inexecrable dog!
And for thy life let justice be accused.
Thou almost makest me waver in my faith
To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
That souls of animals infuse themselves
Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit
Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unballow’d dam,
Infused itself in thee; for thy desires
Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous.
